I don’t think the religion is as bad as people think it is yet the church does nothing, and I mean nothing, to help change the perception about it. It is that so much of it is a mystery to the general public and any time anyone tries to expose it, well, you see what happens. The BBC Panorama episode, available for viewing on Film Threat, shows the difference between being attached to a major media outlet and being a publicist, or spokesperson, for a church. Journalists, good ones anyway, won’t fall for spin. If you try to spin them, they’ll spin it right back on you. This piece is a bit disturbing, even if there are two sides to every story. They ought to bring out in the open what it is their church is about – so people know, so they don’t have to guess.

I think human beings do need religion because life is so utterly unbearable half the time. Why not have faith in a higher power if it eases the pain. But there is isn’t very far to go from attending church to giving over your life to it, to ultimately ending your life for it. Much good has been done in the name of religion, but lord knows the devil has dipped his hand in too.

I’ve decided that there is probably nothing more humiliating, on any level, than believing the TV characters who are vacating your life are actually real people vacating your life. Yet, that was just the thing that happened to me last night while watching the series close out. I was anticipating my own empty nest horror, life without being a mom every day of my life and the panic, oh the panic and then I was watching and crying and crying and watching. I ask you again, is there anything more humiliating? Well, of course there is. I bathe in humiliation every day. Literally. Almost. Not only do I always say exactly the wrong thing in meetings or gatherings but I can be counted on to always look my worst when I’m supposed to be looking my best. What was it about avoiding life that was supposed to be bad anyway?

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about this that bothers me. It seems to bother me on multiple levels, which is probably the point behind the union of these two. But it bothers me as an older woman and as a mother.

Full disclosure: I was cheated on and subsequently left for a girl twenty years younger than me, so it’s natural I would feel threatened by younger women. I understand the male urge to be with, mate with, and hang around younger girls. First, I think men are biologically programmed to do that. But second, they especially appeal to men who are children underneath their balding pates. They like feeling the kind of power only a younger girl can bring. Being seen with one is like you have something other men don’t (usually money but occasionally, for girls looking for daddy figures, you just have to be older – and then very rarely there is the mind connection. But, as Jack Nicholson once lays out pretty well in Wolf, the only reason there is a mind connection is because the guy’s are interested sexually).

Men can’t be blamed, women can’t be blamed. When I was a young woman, like as young as 15, it was flattering to have an older man’s attention. In fact, it was the kind of stupid thing young girls brag about to their friends, right alongside “I’m drunk” and “I lost my virginity last night.” It’s just one of those things that seems cooler than it really is at the time.

Get to be my age and it all looks ridiculous. What women realize when they get older is that they were selling their very highly valued commodity very cheap. The ones who marry for money, however, at least cash in on it.

For these two, I’m wondering, what does Evan Rachel Wood get out of it? We know what Marilyn Manson gets out of it, fresh meat – the chance to not get upstaged by his hotter girlfriend (Dita) – the chance to be the more expert lover.

But since I’m a mom of a young girl it is the girls I worry about. If Rachel Wood is really happy playing the adoring one-girl fan club, so be it. But she’s going to wake up from this nightmare and realize she derailed an otherwise decent career. She’s doing the rebel thing but, in my unsolicited opinion, she’s taking it too far. I want to see her going out in daytime, not being repeatedly fucked in a music video (for which she will always ONLY be known), moving beyond the need to rebel.

I used to like Marilyn Manson. I thought he was a smart cookie. Now he just looks ridiculous – clinging to his young prey with the same kind of desperation of an aging lion who has made one final, showy kill to illustrate to his tribe that he’s still got it. He’s got it but for how long? Rachel Wood will soon get bored of the guy, especially once she realizes that underneath the tats and the lipstick and the pseudo scary knives and costumes there is just a scared little man afraid of growing old.